JOYCE, JAMES (AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS)
(February 2, 1882--January 13, 1941)

Irish poet, dramatist and novelist, was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, the first born child of John Stanislaus. The father a jolly, bibulous, pugnacious fellow, well known in Dublin for his reckless extravagance, and his biting wit, was an impoverished gentleman who, after he had failed in a distillery business, turned to all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting. Like his eldest son--there were eventually six more children--he had a fine singing voice. Joyce's mother, the former Mary Jane Murray, ten years younger than Stanislaus, was an accomplished pianist whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and her husband (in that order).

Joyce was educated almost exclusively by Jesuits: at the highly prestigious boarding school Clongowes Wood College, at Clane (1888-1891), which (he said, he entered "at the age of half-past six") and then--for financial reasons--at the cheaper day-school, Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-1897). At the latter establishment he excelled in essay writing. Still deeply religious, he considered joining the Jesuit order at the age of fifteen. But, despite the wishes of his increasingly pious mother, he decided against this, and instead went on to the Jesuit-run University College. His career at university (1898-1902) seemed undistinguished. He studied  Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as Latin, French, German--and in addition to all that, in order to read Ibsen, he learned Norwegian. His first publication, an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken, appeared in the leading periodical Fortnightly Review in April 1900. He reacted to his Jesuit training in a spirit of actively sarcastic revolt, but was at the same time influenced by Catholic scholasticism and its methodology. He published none of his earliest creative work in his lifetime, but it included brief poems, some of those "epiphanies"--those "moments of fullness or of passion," conveying the "flavor of unpalatable experiences"--for which he became so famous, a virulent essay called "The Day of the Rabblement," against the Irish National Theatre (of which he did publish a few copies privately), reviews of books, two Ibsen-like plays, translations of plays by both Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann--not to speak of the story which became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Thus, while his experiments were tentative, his main cause at this time was realism tending towards naturalism. Although Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) cannot be taken as strictly autobiographical, it is nonetheless in all essentials the spiritual testament of one of the most original and dedicated writers of his age. Its hero (and simultaneously, anti-hero), Stephen Dedalus chooses "silence, exile, and cunning" in order to free himself from "nationalism, language, religion." Joyce did welcome the aims of Sinn Fein, and was, in the words of Bernard Benstock, "a mild socialist generally"; unlike Yeats, though, he kept himself apart from Irish politics. He felt happiest in Europe, and thought of himself as a part of its, rather than Irish or British, culture. As his chief biographer, Richard Ellmann, wrote, although Joyce drew on variously socialism, the anarchistic ideas of the American Benjamin Tucker, and Nietzsche--a pervasive influence at that time he was "at heart" neither a socialist or a Nietzschean: "his interest was in the ordinary even more than in the extraordinary; but in 1903-1904 . . . it was emollient to think of himself as a superman. . . . To his aunt . . . he confided, I want to be famous while I am alive.'"

In January 1903 Joyce went to Paris, where he associated with the eccentric German poet Teodor Dä and, more notably, with his compatriot the playwright John Millington Synge. He had to go back to Dublin in mid-April when his mother's fatal illness was diagnosed; she died in August. He remained in Dublin for the next eighteen months, during which he pursued his important friendship with fellow writer and poet (and surgeon) Oliver St. John Gogarty, met Nora Barnacle--who was to live with him until 1931, when he at last married her--and made a beginning on his first major work, "A Portrait of the Artist," at first just a story, then remodelled into the long "Stephen Hero," and finally cut to middle length as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This process took a decade. In October 1904 Joyce returned to Europe, with Nora Barnacle. They spent two days in Paris, went on to Zurich, and finally landed up at Pola, near Trieste, where Joyce found a job teaching English at the Berlitz School of Languages. Shortly afterwards, in March 1905, he was able to transfer back to the more congenial Trieste itself, to do the same job. He and Nora were to spend most of the next ten years there, their stay ended only by the advent of World War I, which sent them first to Zurich and then to Paris. Their son Giorgio was born in July of the same year; Joyce's younger brother, Stanislaus (he was now twenty), was persuaded to join them in October. He, Shaun the postman to Joyce's own Shem the penman (as Joyce would picture them in Finnegans Wake), also taught at the Scuola Berlitz. "My goldfashioned brother near drave me roven mad," he would later write in Finnegans Wake. In 1906, briefly, Joyce moved to Rome and worked in a bank as a foreign correspondent; but he was soon back in Trieste. There, between frequent bouts of drunkenness in socialist workers' café and quarrels with Nora, he worked on his novel and on the Dubliners stories.

His first publication, with the London firm of Elkin Matthews, was the collection of poems, Chamber Music, which appeared in 1907, the same year, that Nora gave birth to their daughter, Lucia. Chamber Music consists of very minor poems, cast in a form that lies somewhere between that of the Elizabethan, the late nineteenth-century French, and the Pre-Raphaelite lyric. All are somewhat ironically "exquisite." The title was suggested, Joyce later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot. Many of the poems are loaded with pleasantly outrageous sexual double entendres, their high indelicacy nicely counterpointing their actual delicacy and grace. As Bernard Benstock has pointed out, this anecdote--even though it relates to a deliberately insubstantial work--aptly "points to the dual character of much of Joyce's work: the blending of the sacred and the profane, the exalted and the mundane." Benstock might have gone further: to draw attention to the all-important fact that Joyce was able to see (and to feel) the sacred in the profane, as well as the profane in the sacred. Not a "believer" in the ordinary sense of the word, Joyce none the less brought to everything he wrote a fiercely religious and acutely sensitive apprehension of the holy; this reaction was often given an angry, and therefore satirical, edge, owing to his hurt at the wooden and cruel dogmatism of his early training--and at his mother's mechanical piety. Pound later wrote, in a letter to John Quinn, that the "real man" Joyce, after the "shell of cantankerous Irishman" had been dissolved, was the "sensitive," "the author of Chamber Music." "The rest is genius."

In 1909, back in Dublin, he opened a cinema, the Volta, which quickly failed, and signed the contract for Dubliners with the publishers Maunsel & Co, whose proprietor was George Roberts, Roberts' delays and the eventual cancellation of this contract were to frustrate Joyce greatly. He had earlier signed a similar contract with Grant Richards, but that had been cancelled owing to Joyce's refusal to make changes in the interests of what he called "the holy ghost." Joyce was back in Trieste in January 1910, still broke, and still trying to make money in a variety of ways scarcely conducive to his writing: among them. English teaching, tweed salesman, journalist, lecturer.

In 1912 he took Nora and his children on what was to be his last journey to Ireland. His chief purpose was to try to persuade George Roberts to fulfil his contract. The result, despite capitulations on Joyce's part, was that Roberts and his printer destroyed what they had set up into type, and so Joyce returned to Trieste with nothing accomplished--except his ballad to Roberts (a former traveller in ladies' underwear), "Gas From a Burner" ("Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print/The name of the Wellington Monument. . . .") in which he made fun of the publisher's cowardice in not allowing him to print the real names of real places and establishments in Dublin. This he had distributed throughout Dublin as a broadside.

At the end of 1913 things at last began to look up for Joyce. He was "discovered" by Ezra Pound, who heard of him through Yeats, and who immediately began to market (and himself publish) his poems, his stories, and the beginning of A Portrait. Because of Pound, Grant Richards at last published Dubliners on 15 June 1914 (which by the end of that year had sold 499 copies). This collection, distinguished by its demonstration of the author's capacity for "scrupulous meanness," is a carefully planned rejection and celebration of Dublin, ending with his first published masterpiece, "The Dead."

Now encouraged, Joyce was able at last to finish A Portrait, and, eventually (after no fewer than seven printers had refused to set the type) published it with B. W. Heubsch in 1916. The writer to whom this book which made his reputation owes most--as do so many others--is Flaubert, from whom Joyce learned how to distance himself from, and yet remain identified with, his material. Stephen Daedalus, at its center throughout, is revealed as immature in his quest to outdo, God as an artist. It could be argued that God, precisely because of his creator's distancing technique, remains the victor. Stephen was to re-surface in Ulysses, upon which Joyce was now working, but he is supplanted in importance by a more "ordinary" man, Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner of Hungarian-Jewish descent. Pound, for one--although he continued to support him--was disgusted that Joyce should replace an artist with a mere homme moyen sensuel, and an Irish Jew of Hungarian descent to boot. But that was Joyce's special distinction amongt the great modernist writers: he felt that artists were ordinary men (too), and that ordinary men were perhaps the best artists.

Joyce and his family had to go to neutral Zü, where he pledged his neutrality to the Austrian authorities, in 1915. Here, between bouts of heavy drinking, friendship with many writers (if not with Lenin, who was also there), and theatrical ventures, he continued with Ulysses and finished his only (extant) play, Exiles, which was published by Grant Richards in 1920. In this Ibsenite problem play, a wild variant on Shaw's Candida, (obsene), full of private allusions, Joyce failed to find his true voice, and it has never been played with real success, although its symbolism has been praised.

Joyce finally finished what is undoubtedly his greatest work, Ulysses, in Paris. Although already troubled by the glaucoma which would lead to many eye operations and ultimate half-blindness, he would not compromise over its contents. Fortunately, plenty of patrons of literature, in particular Harriet Shaw Weaver, were able to give him the financial support he required. Parts of it were serialized in The Little Review, copies of which were seized--and the editors convicted of obscenity. Other parts appeared in The Egoist. It finally appeared as a book, under the imprint of Sylvia Beach's publishing company Shakespeare & Co, based in Paris, on February 2, 1922--possibly the most important date in the literary history of the twentieth century.

Ulysses became a cause as well as a great book. It was not until 1933 that Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in a New York court that it was "not pornographic." The first trade edition came from Random House in the following year. At its original appearance it was either condemned outright, or given the high due it receives now. It was seen as an obscene joke, as "the book of a self-taught working man" (Virginia Woolf, as reported by Chester G. Anderson in his book about Joyce), and as a book which had the "importance of a scientific discovery" (T. S. Eliot). Eliot found it so vital because it manipulated "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity." A scandalized Paul Claudel returned the signed copy with which the author had presented him. Joyce's own account of its "scheme", (in a letter to Carlo Linati and finally published in Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses') cannot be bettered: "It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me--even when a boy. Imagine, fifteen years ago Joyce was writing in 1921 I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners! For seven years I have been working at this book--blast it! It is also a sort of encyclopaedia. My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri. Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique. Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons--as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts."

Bernard Benstock described Ulysses as, "a tightly controlled narrative, highly mosaic and involuted, a comic, ironic, poetic masterpiece that is multifoliate and kaleidoscopic, revealing new dimensions and proportions with each rereading." This judgment has been confirmed over the years: unlike Pound's Cantos, but like Eliot's The Waste Land (influenced, as Eliot confirmed, by Ulysses) Joyce's masterpiece is one of the few innovatory works whose reputation has never waned. Ford Madox Ford, writing with shrewd foresight in Yale Review, said that Ulysses "contained the undiscovered mind of man. . . . Certain books change the world. This, success or failure, Ulysses does: for no novelist with serious aims can henceforth set out upon a task of writing before he has at least formed his own private estimate as to the rightness or wrongness of the methods of the author . . . "

In March 1923 Joyce began work on what was to be his final book, Finnegans Wake, which appeared in serial form as "Work in Progress" over the next sixteen years, for the most part in Eugene Jolas's Paris-based avant-garde magazine transition. Finnegans Wake, although a rich and comic book, is far less accessible than its predecessor. For it Joyce invented what he called a "night language," a potpourri of all the languages of which he had a knowledge, superimposed on various different kinds of Irish brogues--some satirical and parodic, some not. Its apparently "mad" surface reflects Joyce's guilt--whether needlessly felt, or not--at his daughter Lucia's tragic decent into incurable schizophrenia. C. G. Jung, the twentieth doctor to be consulted--and one who did not give her up as incurable at first--compared her and her father to two people who were going to the bottom of a river; but one was falling, and would drown, while the other was diving. Joyce, perhaps desperately, insisted that Lucia's poems contained "anticipations of a new literature"--but Jung pointed out to him that they were "random." Later, as Richard Ellmann reports, Jung, in a remarkable and brilliant judgment (which in itself might be cited as a defence of Joyce's kind of modernism), wrote that Lucia was "definitely Joyce's femme inspiratrice. . . . His own Anima, i.e. unconscious psyche, was so solidly identified with her, that to have her certified would have been as much as an admission that he himself had a latent psychosis. . . . His psychological' style is definitely schizophrenic but he willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces, which incidentally explains why he himself did not go over the border. . . . In any other time . . . Joyce's work would never have reached the printer, but in our blessed XXth century it is a message, though not yet understood."

Perhaps Jungian-influenced criticism has been most successful in pointing to the richnesses contained in Joyce's massive but not so accessible last work, which, while admired and respected and tasted in small doses, has seldom been read right through except by devotees. In Finnegans Wake there are perhaps five archetypal characters: the husband and father H. C. Earwicker (Here Comes Everywhere), the wife and mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, the twins Shem/Jerry and Shaun/Kevin, and the daughter Issy. The book, set in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod, but also set everywhere, is about Joyce and his family, but also about everybody.

Yet, masterpiece although it undoubtedly is, it has to be noted that in it Joyce declared war against language--perhaps ultimately because Lucia, his beloved daughter, declared war against sanity. For the few, Finnegans Wake is the greatest book of the twentieth century; for the common reader it is a mightly oddity.

When the Nazis entered France, Joyce and his family went into exile to Zurich, where, suffering from a perforated duodenum, weak and prematurely aged, he died, after an operation. He had been the most important and influential of all the twentieth century innovators.

Principal Works: Fiction--Dubliners, 1914; A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, 1916; Ulysses, 1922; Finnegans Wake, 1939; Stephen Hero, 1944; Giacomo Joyce, 1968. Poetry--Chamber Music, 1907; Collected Poems, 1936. Letters--Gilbert, S. (ed.) The Letters of James Joyce, Vol 1, 1957, Ellmann, R. (ed) Vols 2 and 3, 1966. Criticism--Ellmann, R. (ed) The Critical Writings, 1959. Play--Exiles, 1918. Bibliography--Deming, R. H. A. Bibliography of James Joyce Studies, 1964; Slocum, J. J. A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1953. Selections--(Levin, H. (ed.) The Portable James Joyce, 1947, The Essential James Joyce, 1948; Connolly, T. E. James Joyce's Scribbledhobble, 1961; Scholes, R. and Kain, R. M. (eds.) The Workshop of Daedalus, 1965. The James Joyce Quarterly 1963--(contains an annual bibliography). Also: James Joyce Archives, 64 vols, 1979.

About: Adams, R. M. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses, 1962; Atherton, J. S. The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, 1960; Beach, S. Shakespeare and Company, 1959; Beckett, S. and others Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929; Benstock, B. J. Joyce-again's Finnegans Wake, 1965, James Joyce: The Undiscover'd Country, 1977; Blamires, H. The Bloomsday Book, 1966; Brandabur, E. Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work, 1971; Budgen, F. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934; Campbell. J. and Robinson, H. M. Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, 1944; Colum, M. and P. Our Friend James Joyce, 1958; Ellmann, R. James Joyce, 1959, Ulysses on the Liffey, 1972; Gilbert, S. James Joyce's Ulysses, 1930; Goldman, A. The Joyce Paradox, 1966; Healey, A. (ed.) The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, 1962; Joyce, S. My Brothers Keeper, 1958; Kain, R. M. Fabulous Voyager, 1949; Kenner, H. Dublin's Joyce, 1955, Joyce's Voices, 1978; Litz, A. W. The Art of James Joyce, 1961; Maglaner, M. and Kain, R. M. Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, 1956; O'Brien, D. The Conscience of James Joyce, 1968; Ryf, R. S. A New Approach to Joyce, 1962; Tindall, W. Y. James Joyce, 1950, A Readers' Guide to Joyce, 1959. Periodicals--Yale Review 9, 1922.